News & Reviews

Everything is now confirmed and the airline ticket has been purchased. I will be speaking at a climate change conference in Munich in a few weeks. According to the currently-posted schedule the conference will begin with a formal welcome from one of the organizers at 9 am on Friday, November 25th. Speaker number one, at 9:10 am, will be yours truly.

The following week I will be delivering a similar talk on Wednesday afternoon (Nov. 30) at a meeting being held at the UK Parliament, to which UK legislators are invited.

My message in both cases will be straightforward – the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cannot be trusted. We would be foolish to believe that an organization that doesn’t describe its own personnel, its own reports, or its own processes accurately is making sound decisions about something as complicated as climate change.

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A review of my book-length IPCC exposé made the front page of the NuclearStreet.com website last week. That review appears here, followed by a comment directly below that sputters about “Tea Party bullshit,” stupidity, right-wing hack jobs, and attacking “established science.”

Another marvelous review, titled The crumbling edifice of the IPCC, was published last week at OnlineOpinion.com.au – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate.

A while ago there was a posting over at the Shub Niggurath Climate blog that is one of my favourite commentaries with respect to my book. He jokes that when the Canadian government sends silly stuff to people’s homes, unexpected things can happen. Read it here.

An opinion-editorial (op-ed) I wrote for FoxNews.com was published recently. It provides a summary of some of the main ideas in my book and may be seen here.

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For regular readers of this blog, much of what is discussed in the articles linked to above is far from new. But there are still large swaths of our community that remain distressingly naive with respect to the IPCC. JunkScience.com points to a story full of adoration for IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri that was published over at Treehugger.com last week.

That article declares, in all seriousness, that the IPCC “consists of highly-regarded, politically inactive scientists.” I guess IPCC insiders such as the World Wildlife Fund vice-president (Richard Moss), Greenpeace ‘legend’ (Bill Hare), and 20-year employee of the Environmental Defense Fund (Michael Oppenheimer) simply don’t exist.

The UN may have asked the InterAcademy Council (IAC) to investigate after the IPCC admitted its 2007 report included mistaken information about Himalayan glaciers. (The IPCC said these glaciers would shrink to one-fifth their size by 2035. It cited only one piece of evidence – a World Wildlife Fund report. Many glaciologists considered that date “inherently ludicrous.”)

The IAC committee may have concluded that the Himalayan glacier mistake could have been entirely avoided had the IPCC listened to its own expert reviewers.

IPCC insiders may have told the committee they were dismayed at how poorly chairman Pachauri handled this matter – rather than promising to look into things, he attacked the IPCC’s critics, accusing them of arrogance and of practicing “voodoo science.”

The IAC committee may have said that Pachauri should step down. It may have said that, in “a field as dynamic and contested as climate change” two six-year terms as IPCC chairman is too long.

Yet according to the Treehugger article nothing of import actually happened, Pachauri is a saint, and the IPCC behaved admirably:

last year, an unfortunate error in how scientists had measured glacier melt in the Himalayas lead [sic] to overheated – and baseless – ‘scandal’ charges from the IPCC’s foes. For its part, the IPCC acknowledged the mistake, transparently corrected the error, and carried on.

Oh, brother. We’ve got a long way to go, folks. I can assemble IPCC facts and figures into a book, I can list one scandal after another, and identify irregularity after irregularity. But unless that book makes its way into the hands and thoughts of a far wider group of people nothing much is going to change anytime soon.